I Kill Monsters

by Dennis Liggio

  Part of me wondered if I would be safer just shutting the door and staying in the room. But I knew that was foolish. At some point some sort of containment protocols would kick in. Eventually if they couldn't stop what was going on down here, they'd do something extreme like fill the entrances to this floor with cement or pump poison gas in. Whatever horrible testing Minerva Technics was doing, no matter the douchebags they employed, I knew that they were not going to let their creature zoo escape out into Midtown if they could help it. Probably at all costs. And right now, I was a very small cost in their eyes.

  My next step was to find Mikkel. Since I had been thrown into a conference room as a holding cell, I figured so would be Mikkel. I tried the doors on this corridor while calling his name. I heard a muffled response from one door.

  I sized up the door and decided whether I could kick it down. Then I grabbed the handle, wondering if I could just twist that very hard to break the lock. These were conference rooms, they had never been intended for security. Only privacy. I grabbed the handle and twisted.

  The door opened.

  Mikkel was lounging in a chair, his feet up on the desk, his head back.

  "The door wasn't even locked," I said.

  Mikkel shrugged. "There was a guy outside it before."

  "But didn't you try it again? Didn't you hear the alarms?"

  "I figured they had it covered," said Mikkel, getting out of the chair and coming out of the room with me. "So what are the alarms?"

  "They're the sign of something really bad," I said. "All the holding cells are now open. Lockdown protocols are failing. Ezra's worm unlocked them all, from what I heard."

  "But they were closed when we passed them by," said Mikkel.

  I nodded. "From what I overheard, there was some sort of timer so they didn't open immediately."

  "That was nice of him, he gave us time to get the fuck out of here first," he said.

  "Maybe," I said. "I'm not really convinced Ezra would do us any favors. That part might have just been coincidental. It may have been he wanted our security breach to get attention."

  "How do you figure?" said Mikkel.

  "Sutton - Suitguy - was talking to me along with Jessica," I said. "He seemed to be annoyed to be at work this late. Ezra seemed to hate Suitguy. Maybe he wanted Suitguy here for all this."

  "Shit, we are in the middle of the biggest clusterfuck," said Mikkel. "And none of it even involves us!"

  "I thought Jessica needed help," I said weakly.

  "Yeah, she does need help, she needs a de-bitchifying," said Mikkel. "I think Ezra played us, but I think Jessica played us too. She played you especially. This never was our problem, not even when she hired us. This was interoffice politics. There's a reason I don't work in an office. Goddammit!"

  "Sorry," I said.

  "We need to get out of here," said Mikkel. "Which way to the elevator?"

  "There's a problem with that," I said. "I overheard them saying an extraction team was coming down. And that they were going to freeze the elevator at some point. I don't think we can get out that way."

  "But we're not the problem," said Mikkel, but even as he said it, his voice was slowing down as he realized the flaw in his logic. We had been imprisoned here. We had broken into their office and had been the ones who uploaded the worm. We were the current source of all their headaches. I didn't think there was a chance in hell they were going to let us on that elevator. It was more likely that they were going to shoot at us if they saw us go near the elevator.

  "Of course, the other option..." I said, looking toward the other end of the floor. The end with the monsters.

  "We don't even have any weapons," said Mikkel.

  "Not unless you want to tear apart those chairs or tables," I said.

  Mikkel looked back into the room and shook his head. "They're cheap plastic. I think we're pretty damn fucked, but the last thing I want to do is to meet my death trying to beat a monster with useless plastic. I have some dignity."

  We decided to get moving. We had some hope that maybe the holding cell doors had just unlocked but didn't open and the monsters would just sit there not knowing they could escape. Or that maybe they would fight against each other, like some creatures of the night fight club. But we both knew that these things were likely not be true and that we were going into some pretty dangerous territory unarmed.

  So we took our time. While sneaking isn't our preferred method of operation, it wasn't something completely unknown to us. The med center had a main corridor and side halls. We would need to go back to the main hallway to pass through the probably open lockdown doors in the middle of the med center, but until we got there, we saw no need to advertise our presence. We expected both the monsters and MT personnel to be primarily on the main corridor. We instead took all the side corridors, keeping ourselves pressed against the walls and peering into every intersection for danger before crossing it.

  We did see a few black clad commandos, but since we were hiding from them, we didn't get to watch what they were doing. We heard them shouting and moving, but the sirens limited our hearing distance and made it harder to tell what else was going on. We saw no monsters. Once we reached the labs, we realized that these side hallways did not go any farther. We had to turn back toward the main corridor. Through the twisting lab corridors we were able to get close to the intersection of the center lockdown door. We were on a short corridor parallel to it when Mikkel peered around the corner to look at the intersection with the lockdown door itself.

  "Fuck," said Mikkel.

  "What is it?" I whispered. He gestured to the corner and moved back so I could look. "Fuck."

  I could just barely see the lockdown door. I could tell it was open, which was good. But it was completely guarded by commandos, which was bad.

  In front of the lockdown door and facing it was a double threaded line of commandos; they were easy to see, unlike the lockdown door. First was a line of crouched soldiers, rifle out, while behind them was another standing line. The rifles were real assault rifles, not the shock rifles we had previously seen. They were ready for some severe shit, which I actually thought was appropriate, considering what could be coming out of that lockdown door. When the shit hit the fan, they appeared ready to fire and keep firing until whatever arrived was twitching on the ground dead.

  Of course, this meant we weren't getting through the lockdown door.

  "Ideas?" I whispered.

  "Not dying," said Mikkel.

  "Agreed, but I think we're stuck for right now."

  And then we heard a very familiar sound. Above the sirens and the bleep of the nervous commandos' radios, there was a screeching scream joined by many others. I knew that sound well, but had not heard it in such volume. It was the battle cry of ghouls. A lot of ghouls.

  Most of the commandos seemed to recognize it too, as their mood of dread changed to a barely controlled panic. I heard their squad leaders calling out orders to steel themselves.

  Then the screeches grew louder and I could hear the padding of bare feet... many feet.

  Gunfire erupted before I could see anything. Screeches turned to screams of agony barely heard over the deafening sound of assault rifles. The men kept firing, almost manically. I don't blame them for losing it a little and going full auto. I had no idea what they saw down that tunnel, but if they saw a mass of snarling ghouls and weren't allowed to run, I might also have a panicked trigger finger. Despite all this fear, the initial moments made it almost seem like this would be an easily contained threat, all monsters gunned down by high powered weaponry.

  But bad luck hits the most well-oiled of all machines, whether they be a highly trained squad of commandos or expertly assembled assault rifles. Nearly simultaneously, almost due to some curse, some of the rifles jammed. Others had burned through their clip due to panic and had to reload. Many kept firing, but that wasn't enough. The jamming and reloading had taken too much out the full force of the kill zone. Their fiery wall of b
ullet death was not complete.

  And then came the ghouls.

  By this point, Mikkel and I were not even bothering to try to hide around the corner. Nobody cared about us. We simply stood and stared as our jaws dropped. Seconds after the gun jams, the ghouls rushed in. It was like a massive tsunami of pale flesh, frothing jaws, and flailing limbs crashed down on the commandos. Half wounded feral ghouls swarmed through the hallway, leaping on the soldiers and slamming them to the ground. Once a few ghouls had broken through, the entire commando line fell into panic.

  Chaos broke out.

  We had fought ghouls before, but we had almost never seen the fight of desperate ghouls. These ghouls had been caged for days or possibly even weeks. They had been experimented on. They had now finally escaped and didn't know where the exit was yet. And finally, many of them had just been gunned down. Blood was already in the air. The ghouls were fueled by the rage of an animal backed into a corner, by the fury of a beast taking a desperate chance to escape, the rage of a wounded pack. The soldiers were now bearing the full brunt of that fury.

  Before our eyes the line of commandos had disintegrated, the soldiers either struggling on the ground with ghouls or running back toward the elevator. The ghouls followed the retreat, the mass of their snarling and flailing bodies disappearing down that hall. Even the ghouls who had pounced on their victims got up to follow after their targets were dead. Escape was more important than feeding.

  In a few moments, the intersection in front of the lockdown was clear - assuming you were ignoring the dead bodies, the ever widening blood pool, and the disappearing smoke of gunfire. I almost did the smartass thing and asked Mikkel just what happened, but we both knew what had happened and we were both freaked out by it. The commandos were not our friends but holy crap was a ghoul tsunami horrifying.

  "I guess... it's clear now?" Mikkel said.

  "Are we sure we need to go through that door?" I said, thinking about what else was in the direction the ghouls came from.

  "Would you rather follow the ghouls?" said Mikkel. "Because those are really our only two options."

  "Fair point," I said. Then the stink of fresh blood caught up with us, wafting down the hall. Before it had been lost in the stink of gunfire, but now we could practically taste the death. It did nothing to make me enthusiastic for what we were doing.

  We walked toward the intersection cautiously. The area was still, almost silent. We heard the ever present sirens, but the only ghoul screeches we heard were in the direction of the elevator. It seemed like we were safe for the moment, but such safety tends to be misleading.

  We tried not to step in the blood, but eventually it was unavoidable. Soldiers and ghouls had died. Their combined blood was an ever widening stain that covered the floor. If we wanted to head through the hallway, we'd need to walk through their entrails.

  Mikkel bent down and picked up an assault rifle. He hefted it and looked down its sights.

  "Dude, you're taking a dead man's gun?" I said.

  "What? We've done it before," he said.

  "But it's still got the man's blood on it!"

  Mikkel turned the rifle and saw the splash of blood I mentioned. Mikkel nodded, then wiped the gun on his jumpsuit to clean it off. "That's better. You should grab one too."

  "But the blood..."

  "Szandor, we're walking in blood already and there's lots more of that to come. I'm really not happy about this, but if we're going to get out of here alive, we'll need to accept things are going to get ugly. We need these guns. So you can either walk around in the blood until you find the gun that's least bloody, or you could just grab one and clean it."

  "But I'm not really a rifle person..." I said. It was true. As has been mentioned, the general sentiment among our peers was that I am a terrible shot. And I had never used anything automatic.

  "Then pick it up and hit people with the butt of it," said Mikkel with some exasperation. "Unless you're going to fight bare knuckle, these are the only weapons we have." He grabbed a few clips off the ground and stuffed them into his jumpsuit. "Besides, firing these things should be our last resort. They're fucking loud. Even with all the chaos behind us, once we're moving the other direction, these things will draw attention. Remember all the crap that we still have to walk through. Spiders and shit."

  I shook my head, not wanting to think about going past that Spider hive. But I conceded Mikkel had a point. I looked down at the nearest commando who wasn't completely dismembered. The ghouls had been brutal with some of their victims. I wanted a commando I could at least think was just unconscious and bloody. The one below me was dead, but not too bloody. I noticed that his armor had a few silver stripes, which made me think he was possibly a squad leader. In addition to grabbing his rifle, I saw his badge. Alan Kellum, Biomedical Security Team Lead. He was a smiling mustached man in the picture, but when I looked at the body I couldn't quite see his real face under the mask. I unclipped his badge and put it in my pocket. I wasn't quite sure if I did this in case we needed it or out of some sort of guilt where I wanted to remember the name whose bloody corpse I looted. Somehow I was far more uncomfortable taking Kellum's badge than I had with Rick Molina's. It had to be the blood.

  My guilt and discomfort was interrupted by a chorus of low moans. I knew this sound well and it alerted me that we had something more important to deal with: zombies.

  We looked down the hallway, past the carnage of dead ghouls which had fallen in the commandos' kill zone. Definitely zombies. We weren't sure if they had heard Mikkel and I talking or if they had simply been following the ghouls at a slower pace, but they were now coming down the hallway toward the open lockdown door. They were thankfully not pressed together closely like a horde in bad zombie films. They were spaced out, but there were still over half a dozen lurching toward us over bloody ghoul corpses.

  Mikkel and I shared a look as we lifted our rifles, butt out.

  "Some things never change, eh?" said Mikkel.

  "Never," I said.

  After seeing that writhing mass of ghouls, a few zombies just didn't feel dangerous. Aside from the blood and bodies, we had plenty of room to move around the zombies and evade their futile flailing. These zombies probably had been stored away for a long time, because their movements were even slower than we used to. Either it was some lethargy from Minerva's testing or they had decayed a great deal.

  Using the butt of our rifles, we were able to bash in the faces of the zombies, which made them drop to the floor dead and unmoving. The smell of their decay wafted up from their newly fractured skulls as we moved onto the next ones. Working together and keeping awareness of where the zombies were, we took care of all we saw.

  "Well that was easy," I said.

  Mikkel nodded. "But we've still got a whole bunch of cells between us and the other exit... assuming it's still open. And we know well that these weren't all the things they kept locked up."

  "Thanks for reminding me."

  We passed through the lockdown doors into the holding area.

  Not of This World

  Neither of us were surprised to find the cell that held the revenant was now empty. The hairs on the back of my neck crawled when I saw the empty room. I looked around to see if he was on one of the side corridors, but that was foolish. In this chaos, there would be no way to see the revenant before he struck, not with a revenant's speed and stalking abilities. Revenants are Alpha hunters and we were in a goddamn warzone and needing to go deeper into hostile territory.

  "It's kinda like the movie Predator," said Mikkel.

  I gave Mikkel a look and shook my head. Movie reference or not, if the revenant was around, we had problems. I just hoped the revenant was more interested in leaving than killing the only two guys in the building who actually had nothing to do with his confinement.

  Next were the ghoul holding cells. These were of course empty too. I'm not sure if the deluge of ghouls held all of them, but I could think of no reason why they would stay
in the cells. While we had recently seen something to suggest they weren't purely animalistic, they were feral enough that they'd try to get out as soon as they could. We expected that if the commandos at the elevator weren't dealing with all the ghouls, then the rest had run for the other exit, the one we were going for.

  Pushing past the empty ghoul pens meant we were heading toward the Spiders. Honestly, this is where I was most worried. A revenant escaping meant there was an assassin on the loose. A ghoul escape meant there was a ravenous horde of screeching, jumping madmen. A zombie escape could be an endless moaning wall of decaying flesh. But a Spider escape? That was different. Spiders were an insectoid race. They were like an infection made flesh. They were industrious, quick, hive-minded, and they lacked any of the back brain emotions of the other monsters. Spiders didn't panic, they didn't get tired, they didn't make mistakes.

  Due to this, I expected to walk down to this next section of the med center to see the walls covered with Spiders, dead bodies now being covered with resin to form one giant hive. Mikkel was musing that it would be like the big nest in the reactor from Aliens. I wasn't familiar with that scene, but it didn't sound good. I agreed with his next statement that we should nuke the site from orbit to be sure.

  We were of course surprised when we neared the first intersection before the Spider pens that the walls were not covered with teeming insectoid limbs. In fact, the hall looked kind of quiet. We couldn't see farther down the hall since the main white lights had been shut down in favor of the red siren lights, but we saw no noticeable Spider infection. Maybe they had stayed inside their cell?

  We instead heard slow booted footsteps. We tensed, slowing to a stop. From around the corner of the intersection, a soldier slowly walked out and turned to us. I couldn't read his facial expression, but there was no blood on him. His gas mask was around his neck and he held a bandolier of Spider canisters. We readied ourselves for a fight, but the commando held his rifle with just one arm slack at his side. He slowly raised his hand to wave at us.